Robert Sawyer - Frameshift

Amanda smiled and made a small sound low in her throat.

Pierre leaned back in his chair. He hated that sound, that little thrumming. Each time Amanda made it, his heart skipped. Maybe this time — maybe at last…

Molly pointed at the brightly wrapped box and spoke to Amanda. “Look what Erik and Uncle Sven and Aunt Ingrid brought for you,” she said.

“Look! A present for the birthday girl.” She turned to the adult Lagerkvists. “Thanks so much, guys. We really appreciate you coming over.”

“Oh, it’s our pleasure,” said Ingrid. She was wearing her red hair loose about her shoulders. “Erik and Amanda always seem to have such a good time together.”

Pierre looked away. Erik was two; Amanda was one. Normally, they wouldn’t have made good playmates, but Erik’s Down’s syndrome had already held up his mental development enough that he really was at much the same stage as Amanda.

“Would either of you care for coffee?” asked Pierre, meticulously rising from his chair, then holding on to its back until he was completely steady.

“Love some,” said Sven.

“Please,” said Ingrid.

Pierre nodded. They’d gotten past the point, thank God, where Ingrid insisted on offering to help Pierre with every little thing. He could manage making coffee — although he would need someone else to carry the steaming cups back to the living room.

He poured ground coffee into the coffeemaker. Next to the machine sat the cake Molly had bought, a Flintstones birthday cake crowned with plastic figures of Fred and Wilma surrounding a baby Pebbles; Molly had said there had been a Barney/ Betty/Bamm Bamm version for little boys.

Red lettering on the white frosting said “Happy First Birthday, Amanda.”

Pierre resisted the urge to sneak a bit of the icing. He added water to the coffeemaker, then headed back into the living room.

The unopened gift had been set aside; they’d wait till after the cake for that. Erik and Amanda were now playing with two of Amanda’s favorite plush toys, a pink elephant and a blue rhinoceros.

Molly smiled up at Pierre as he came in. “They’re so cute together,” she said.

Pierre nodded and tried to return the smile. Erik was a well-behaved little boy; he seemed to be passing calmly through what for a normal child would have been the Terrible Twos. But, then, they knew exactly what was wrong with Erik. It was tearing Pierre up not knowing what was wrong with Amanda. After an entire year of life, she hadn’t said so much as “Mama” or “Dada.” There was no doubt that Amanda was a bright girl, and no doubt that she seemed to understand spoken language, but she wasn’t using it herself. It was both heart-wrenching and puzzling. Of course, many children didn’t speak until after their first birthday. But, well, Molly’s biological father was a certified genius and her mother was a Ph.D. in psychology; surely she should be on the fast end of the developmental cycle, and—

No, dammit. This was a party — hardly the occasion to be dwelling on such things. Pierre returned to the living room.

Ingrid, on the couch, gestured at Erik and Amanda. “The time goes by so quickly,” she said. “Before we know it, they’ll be grown.”

“We’re all getting older,” said Sven. He’d been cleaning his Ben Franklin glasses on the hem of his safari shirt. “Of course.” he said, replacing them on his nose, “I’ve felt old ever since the girls in Playboy started being younger than me.”

Pierre smiled. “What did it for me was Partridge Family reruns. When I first encountered that show in the mid-seventies, I thought Susan Dey was the hot one. But I saw a rerun recently, and she’s just a skinny kid.

Now I can’t take my eyes off Shirley Jones.”

Laughter.

“I knew that I was getting old,” said Molly, “when I found my first gray hair.”

Sven waved his arm dismissively. “Gray hair is nothing,” he said; there were more than a few in his massive beard. “Now, gray pubic hair…”

The doorbell rang again. Pierre went to open it this time. Burian Klimus stood on the stoop, his ever-present pocket notebook visible in his breast pocket.

“I hope I’m not too late,” said the old man.

Pierre smiled without warmth. He had hoped that his boss had been kidding about wanting to come over for the baby’s birthday. Klimus kept finding reasons to visit Molly and Pierre at home, kept looking at little Amanda, kept writing things in his notebook. Pierre wanted to tell him to go to hell, but he still wasn’t permanently assigned to LBNL. Sighing, he stood aside and let Klimus come in.

Everyone had gone home. The cake had been devoured, but the cardboard tray it had come on still sat on the dining-room table, a ring of frosting and crumbs on its upper surface. Empty wineglasses were perched on various pieces of furniture and on one of the stereo speakers.

They’d clean it up later; for now, Pierre just wanted to sit on the couch and relax, his arm around his wife’s shoulders. Little Amanda sat in Molly’s lap, and with her chubby left hand was holding on to one of her father’s fingers.

“You were a good girl today,” Pierre said in a high-pitched voice to Amanda. “Yes, you were.”

Amanda looked up at him with her big brown eyes.

“A very good girl,” said Pierre.

She smiled.

“Da-da,” said Pierre. “Say ‘Da-da.’ ”

Amanda’s smile faded.

“She’s thinking it,” said Molly. “I can hear the words. ‘Da-da, Da-da.’

She can articulate the thought.”

Pierre felt his eyes stinging. Amanda could think the thought, and Molly could hear the thought, but for Pierre from his daughter there was only silence.

Time passed.

Pierre had spent a long and mostly fruitless morning trying different computer models for coding schemes in his junk-DNA studies. He leaned back in his desk chair, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and arched his spine in a stretch. His can of Diet Pepsi was empty; he thought about going to the vending machine to get another.

The door opened, and Shari Cohen came in. “I’ve finally got the last of those reports, Pierre,” she said. “Sorry it took so long.”

Pierre waved her closer and had her place them on his desk. He thanked her, added the new reports to the pile of other genetic tests of murder victims that had been submitted earlier, squared all the pages off by tapping them on their four sides, then started going through them.

Nothing unusual on the first. Nada on the second. Zip on the third. Oh, here’s one — the Alzheimer’s gene. Bupkes on number five. Diddly on six.

Ah, a gene for breast cancer. And here’s a poor fellow who had both the Alzheimer’s gene and the neurofibromatosis gene. Three more with nothing. Then one with a gene for heart disease, and another with a predisposition to rectal cancer…

Pierre made notes on a pad of graph paper. When he’d gone through all 117 reports, he leaned back in his chair again, flabbergasted.

Twenty-two of the murder victims had major genetic disorders. That was — he rummaged on his cluttered desk for his calculator — just under 19 percent. Only 7 percent of the general population had the genetic disorders Pierre had asked the grad students to test for.

The samples Helen had provided had all been labeled, but Pierre didn’t recognize any of the 117 names, let alone the 22 of them who had had major genetic disorders. He’d hoped some of them would have been people he knew of from the UCB/LBNL community, or people he’d heard Klimus mention in passing.

And there was still the problem of Bryan Proctor. The only murder conclusively related to the attempt on Pierre’s life was Proctor’s; Chuck Hanratty had been involved in both. But there was no tissue sample from Proctor, and nothing Proctor’s wife had said to Pierre indicated that he’d had any genetic disorder. He’d have to find the time to visit Mrs. Proctor again, but—